by David Masiel
“I can’t take that shit. Makes me crazy.”
“You rather be crazy or dead? Go get some mefloquine from the damned sick bay. You look bad.”
“I can’t make it down there.”
“I’d send Jimmy down but I need him on the wheel.”
“I tell you, I am Danny,” said the Liberian.
“I can take the wheel. Do you read English?” Snow asked.
“Sure. I read English. Tell him I am Danny.”
“He’s Danny,” Snow said. “Now give me a pen.”
Paynor shoved the drafting compass across to him, and Snow took it, his hands quivering badly as he opened the compass until the sharp graphite tip was as far open as he could get it. Awkwardly, through shaking broken hands and the pounding of the ship, he scrawled on a corner of the chart:
QUININE.
CHLOROQUINE.
MEFLOQUINE.
Then he tore it off and handed the yellowed corner of chart paper to the Liberian. “Bring me all these,” Snow said. “Much as they have.”
“Okay, bos’n.”
Paynor stared at Snow’s bad eye. “Why the hell did Bracelin hit you?”
“’Cause he tried to hurt her, that’s why.”
Paynor took the paper from Danny’s hand. “You better let me go down. I got us at this position here—” and he moved over the chart table, where he had them farther south than Snow had imagined possible.
“We’re off Cape Fria? That’s Namibia. What the hell happened to Angola?”
“We got blown past. Got blown toward the coast too. But I figure we got another fifty miles of sea room. Just keep the head up and I’ll be back.”
Paynor went out and down through the internal ladder while Snow stood by the chart table and Danny held to the wheel. “How’s your brother doing below?” he asked.
“He okay, we no change the engine for hour or more, bos’n,” said Danny.
Snow stared at the chart of the Skeleton Coast, the northern section of Namibia from here to Walvis Bay. They might make Walvis Bay, he thought, but anything in between was only sand dunes and diamond dirt. He felt the giant wood screw to his head, the voices there turning to murmurs, drowned out by pain. He tried to focus on the chart. He knew the coastline here was more variable than any chart could keep up with. There were seamounts all over, running in a diagonal away from the coast in a belt of undersea mountains called the Walvis Ridge. He read a notation from the Sailing Directions: Warning: the coastline here is reported to be two miles west of current charts (1975).
He looked up toward the forward windows, which from back by the chart table gave him a view of the fo’c’sle deck only. The bow lifted and slammed into a trough. He wondered about the hogging, how much worse it was now. He took the chance of letting go of the chart table and let gravity carry him to the radar scope. He checked the sweep of it—the green clutter of storm. He brought up the gain and lowered the clutter—and caught nothing but a frayed band of something about twenty miles east. Paynor couldn’t be that far off his position fix; he was too good a navigator. “We got a hundred feet of water here,” Snow said. “We got twenty miles of sea room, maybe. We need to put out anchors and I got no crew to do it.” Snow timed his movement to the forward window, held the railing there by the radio telephone, and looked out over the whole of the deck just in time to see Bracelin come into view, bulky yellow rain suit fighting through the spray up the centerline catwalk.
“Goddamn him, goddamn him!” Snow stood as long as he could, then let himself drop to a sitting position. He sat against the bulkhead, his head knocking on the steel, which turned the wood screw into a jackhammer, pounding in and out of his brain. The swelling pulse of his headache overcame him, and he leaned over and heaved onto the deck, a bilious foamy excretion streaked with black strings of semi-coagulated blood.
“Head up, Danny boy,” said Snow, trying a weak smile.
“Head up,” he said, staring at the mess on the deck, then catching himself and snapping his eyes back to the gyrocompass.
Snow was sitting there for no more than three minutes before he heard a sliding sound from below, as if a giant sheet of baking trays had slid across the deck immediately below them. But this was deeper, a rumbling that came from the stern. He recognized the sound, and at the moment of backward force, he let go of the chart table and let himself be thrown aft onto the wheelhouse deck. He reached upward, put a hand to the bulkhead railing and with every last little bolt of energy he could manage lifted himself to a kneeling position, jerked himself to his feet, and wobbled there with both hands on the rail. He looked astern in time to see the covered lifeboat bobbing up a wave behind them, its orange bullet shape appearing like something out of science fiction as it rocked against the windblown crest, the inboard engine groaning as the squirrelly craft heaved over the wave and powered straight downwind toward the Skeleton Coast. He saw the thing yaw badly, turn nearly broadside to a wave, teeter on the edge and nearly roll, then right itself in the next trough and motor on away from the ship with water draining all around that hatch with the brand-new seal. Snow couldn’t see anyone in the tiny angled windows at the front of the craft, but he didn’t need to see, for he knew who was driving the thing, knew as certain as he knew anything that he wouldn’t be getting his malaria meds now unless Danny went down to get them for him, or, worse yet, he went down on his own.
Then he refocused and saw the bridge wing, where Beth stood, shivering, gazing inward. He waved her inside and fell toward her as she passed through the door and hooked her arm up under his. “I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t find Leeds or Maciel.”
“We gotta go down. I need meds.”
They started down the external stairs, but soon it was apparent that Snow couldn’t make it down in the storm. They ducked into the second-deck door, Beth helping him along. “I just wanted to thank you for what you did back there.”
“Wasn’t nothing to it.” Snow grinned.
They worked their way down the internal stair tower to the afterdeck and around the back of the house to the side deck, where the light from the boatswain’s locker cast outward, and inside they heard clattering of gear and the grunts of someone exasperated. They stepped inside to find Maciel rummaging through the cubbies, turning to see them there, his eyes showing full-blown panic. “Where the hell have you been? Have you see him? I think he got Momo. I can’t find Momo.”
“What about Leeds?”
“Leeds? I have no idea! Where the hell is Leeds? We need Leeds! We need dim mak! You think he got Leeds too? Is it possible?”
Snow found himself sitting down in a swirling puddle of water, raining in through the door. The shrieks of the wind pressed at his ears. He heard the distant groans of men, or perhaps the ship itself, wailing like a desperate human.
“Have you seen any of those ax handles? I have to find one.”
Snow looked up at him, saw him dig down deep into a box of bolts like he’d find one in there, and then he caught sight of something left, a shade he thought, and Beth was rising up over him, and behind her loomed the form of Bracelin, his face all twisted up. “You looking for one of these?” he said.
And he brought the bludgeon down onto Beth.
Her reaction time was better than Snow’s. She ducked and the ax handle hit her in the upper back, knocking the wind from her as she slumped forward with a grunt, and fell onto Snow. He wrapped his arms around her and turned her away, holding his hand up in case Bracelin struck again. But he was moving for George then, the kid still sifting through the cubbies looking for something, then turning with a flash of red—a small pipe wrench—that he swung in a wide sweep at Bracelin and caught him just below the left eye.
Bracelin’s head whipped sideways in a snarl, then righted itself and he bull-rushed Maciel, driving his head into the kid’s solar plexus and butting him straight back into the cubbies, pipe fittings crashing all around him. Bracelin let out an animal sound as the kid smashed into bolts and pipe fitting
s. Snow felt his legs lifting, then he was standing. Beth was reaching for an air tank. Then Snow was down again, on his ass. Then he was on his back. He saw them over his head. Maciel flailed and scratched, trying to keep Bracelin off him, trying to swing the pipe wrench again but missing. Then the kid struck him with a blow to the face and knocked him backward. Beth swung the air tank straight overhead and hit Bracelin on the back of the head with a resounding thump. Snow tried to move. Nothing on him worked. From a sitting position Bracelin drove his hand up into Beth’s stomach and sent her flying backward, doubled over and gasping for air. Her voice came out airless, like those horses heaving. Snow tried to wiggle his toe. Nothing moved.
He could see everything and nothing. The first and the last. Bracelin came to his feet and took the rushing Maciel with a step to one side, lifting him and heaving him through the air. Maciel flew backward. He hit the bank of cubbies, which promptly toppled onto his back. Bracelin stepped away as the rack folded the kid in half, the compartments of pipe and nuts and bolts emptying onto his back. Bracelin turned to Beth and kicked her as hard as he could, then stepped toward Maciel and heaved the wooden rack aside with a grunt and a crash of wood and steel.
Snow looked downward to the door. He felt himself floating, bodiless. He saw Bracelin. The background of black seas, sweeping past in flashes of yellow-white waves. Bracelin descended on the kid and was about to grab him when a pink hand curled around his right eye and his head twisted back. He let out a groan, rising to a shriek as the pink gnarled fingers reached into his eye sockets, and another arm, pink and welted with the lesions of psoriasis, curved around his neck and clutched him there. Bracelin flailed, stumbling backward. He backed himself into the door frame, slamming Leeds into its edge, then falling himself, and the two of them went out the door into the wash of seas receding off the weather deck. Reeling, squirming, doing his monkey kung fu. Leper hands clasping. Maciel rose, gripping an ax handle.
Bracelin swirled and rolled trying to rid himself of Leeds, managed to claw himself to his feet bringing Leeds with him, back into the door, spinning at the doorjamb in a vain attempt to scrape Leeds off his back. The more he flailed and danced, the tighter Leeds gripped him, his legs around his waist, his arms around his neck and face. Maciel moved forward in a lurch and swung the ax handle, but Bracelin got out a hand and deflected it, the bludgeon flying out of the kid’s hand and bouncing to the deck at Bracelin’s feet. Leeds continued to gouge at his eyes while Maciel went for his belt knife. He snapped it open with a flick. He stepped up, casually almost, then drove the blade straight down into Bracelin’s solar plexus. Bracelin erupted in blood. First it came out of the wound itself. Snow was struck by the redness of it. By the white glow of the work lights, by the hiss and rush of the storm. He remembered the moment now, on the afterdeck of the San Luis Rey. He remembered the strange sensation of piercing another man’s skin. How easy it went in if you just gave it enough force. The kid gave it plenty of force, and Bracelin fell backward. Even then Leeds didn’t let go. Maciel stood there heaving breaths, with a look of terror and bloodlust all at once, then reached down and stabbed him again. He stood there in the doorway, his eyes wild and unflinching while Bracelin started to heave up blood from his mouth. Then a wave hurled past and the kid stepped back from the crush of water through the tankerman’s locker, the flushing roar of it inside. The deck had been washed clean. In a swirl of rain and wind and crashing wave, Leeds and Bracelin were gone.
Snow barely registered this. He was busy falling down a long shoot toward black space, the storm raging around him, until a distant part of him realized that both men had been washed overboard and the kid was crying over him, jumping and spinning a circle and then slumping down onto the deck of the locker and crying in great racking sobs with his head down in his hands. Beth moved for him, leaving Snow there alone in a puddle of seawater, and Snow reached out his hand to touch the kid’s knee and pat it, saying it’s okay, it’s okay, see, there really ain’t any doubt about self-defense now and he wanted to laugh but he hadn’t the energy for it, and he wished he could have found time to tell the kid about his grandfather, wished he could have just said I done some bad things in my life, I killed a man once, killed more than one and maybe done worse things.
Water and waves swept the deck outside, curling around and down the drain. Snow crawled toward the opening, moving again, looking out on hands and knees to the terrible grinding sound. He could feel it out there, the cleaving of failed steel. All across the deck he saw the crack widen and the spewing of polymerizing cargoes, fanning up and out of the deck with an explosive rush. From his position on the side deck, looking forward through sheets of water draining, he saw the deck knuckle upward, the bow breaking downward until it was buried into the waves.
Snow awakened to sunlight. He heard voices around him but no engines. The sky spread over him like a warm blanket. It flooded the deck in shifting angles of the house and the pipeline, the melon-colored sky, and the feeling of being lifted, taken away by someone he couldn’t see. He heard a voice, distant, echoless across the void of the post-storm sea swell, crying Hellll—! Snow floated toward the sound, like the pull of a song he could barely hear, and he strained forward to meet it, turned his good ear to the sound of a man yelling Hell, and through his numbness he felt his heart and his face flushed and hands humming. They were lifting him. Black arms at his armpits and his knees, his ass sagging before he felt nothing of his body at all, just the floating as they went over the side. Her voice was at his ear the entire way you’re going to be all right, Harold, you know, I’m not going to leave you and all along the way the steel of the ship curled inside him. Even as they carried him he felt the ship beneath him. He had sweated on and carved rust from the hull of it for so long.
He heard that voice calling Hell again from out over the water, where he could see and feel a part of things even though he was facing upward and staring at sky, but he could feel the arms of his carriers working, taking one for Beth the other for Maciel or Momo or Danny, or maybe all four of them—yes, there were four sets of hands. And legs striding. Out over the sea he saw nothing but flatness and the boiling ocean, the smell of hydrogenated sulfur reeking. The ocean was boiling, in great roiling bubbles and extrusions of foam and exhalations of gas. Boiling! He himself was boiling. His brain baked by fever, infested by parasites. He could feel them in there, lunching on red blood cells and excreting the black bile of his own dying humors. He bled black, he pissed black, his waters gone to rotten mud.
The hell voice remained out there, wailing. Through the yellow-orange light he heard it. Amid a scattering of flotsam, the ship’s deck pitching downward toward the swells. The water had a languid quality, lulling him. But the heat grew oppressive. A hot wind raked his skin. It must have been 120 degrees with 90 percent humidity. Only skyward brought relief. Flying over everything, as if he had bounded out and up the mast to perch himself in the crow’s nest, where in old days they carried land birds and when the ship was lost they’d release the birds and follow them home through the storm. And there was the crow, lifting off, the broad reach of water toward a seamount rising in a pale rocky mass. Distant thundersqualls rose off the horizon as if the two were merged, the great vaulting columns of cloud like the smokes of the earth itself.
The water held ball-shaped fragments of white that came in sizes ranging from ping-pong balls to basketballs and larger, glommed-together bubbles of white like irregular foam balloons stretching out in a plume from the ship’s middle, until his body sank into them and parted them, and he was down inside a skiff without a motor, a goddamned rowboat, seeing arms flicker and pull at the oars over his face, his body baking in the heat. He felt the occasional pause in the up and down of the waves, then a jerking, when the girl said, “Oh, Christ, and what’s this?”
He could lift up and see at will. No hallucination, he could see the seamount and beyond to the white ribboned shores of the Skeleton Coast. And just shy, the call again: Hellllllll-p!<
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Snow heard the cry for help and called back to it with a long internal help! of his own. He thrashed wildly in the bottom of the boat. The hot air hovered stagnant over his face. Then he felt a wave of strength. He grunted and tried to sit up. Maciel was there, helping his head lift up and over the gunwales of the boat. “You been out a long time,” said the kid.
“I ain’t been out at all.”
Beth rowed through the boiling seas, toward the desolate stretch of the Namib. A hellish place. Here the sands of Africa reached out every day to claim new ground in the midst of the ocean. So rapidly was land expanding here that they once found a Spanish galleon shipwrecked amid sand a mile inland. The Namib. Where they said you could sift the sands with your fingers and find diamonds.
Then Beth’s voice bent over him and the long rounded swells brought him down. “You’re going to be all right?” she said. The phrase confused him. The words were a command but her voice was a question. The voice disturbed him. It sounded like his father even through the accent. Snow heard voices out past her, like a hundred boat parties out there bobbing up and down. He tried to pull a breath, the vapors of the ship heavy around his face. Then she kissed him and he thought maybe he wouldn’t be able to breathe at all, that she might smother him before she knew what she’d done. He gasped inward even as he pushed at her and felt her pull away and only then could he draw a subtle breeze into his lungs, almost cool. Her face hovered over him. He could feel the air drifting through her arms and legs, accelerating around and through the filter of her body to feed him. He smelled her but he smelled fresh air too. He relaxed, his arms dropping. Her lips returned to him in a dry round kiss. Urging sweetly. When she pulled away he breathed freely.
Snow lifted, his headache thumping. The kid was rowing, tendons straining, face blank, blood on his hands. Blood on his hands and spattered on his face. Momo the cook was reading a chart. Danny perched at the bow looking out with a pair of binoculars. Maciel rowed. And rowed. The girl fed him water, warm and wet to his lips. Snow heard the voice calling, “Helllllllllp—”